t any plant names in Yiddish - YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

VIII
˘È„”È Ôȇ ËÏÚÂÂ≠ÔÒ˜ÈÂÂÚ‚ È„ Ÿ ¯ÚËÎÚ˘ È΄¯Ó
1. Preface
Until its publication, Plant Names in Yiddish (henceforth: PNY) went
through several stages. After the publication of a smaller project, "Names
of trees and shrubs," whose theoretical part was published in the journal
Yidishe Shprakh (vol. XXVI, 1966, pp. 56-80), objections were raised: why
only trees and shrubs? How about flowers? How about vegetables, especially
those virtually unknown in Eastern Europe? And we ourselves added:
How about the aquatic plants the pedagogue and writer A. Golomb
wrote about in Yiddish? And the mushrooms and toadstools? And the medicinal
plants – how can one understand the Yiddish booklets on folk medicine
if we don't clarify the meanings of the various botanical terms in
them? And how can we possibly ignore the industrial plants about which
quite a bit was written in Yiddish, especially in the Soviet Union? And generally
the botanical terms that were taught in Yiddish schools in Eastern
Europe?
By thus expanding the scope of our project we soon realized that the
result would just be overwhelming, beyond the capabilities of an individual.
Therefore it was decided to leave out many terms in the fields of phytomorphology,
phytoanatomy, phytophysiology, phytoecology, phytogeography,
and phytogenetics, as well as paleobotany, all of which would be left for a
later hoped-for encompassing project, "Terminology of Life Sciences in
Yiddish." As a result, what we were left with in the final analysis was just
plant names, i.e., phytotaxonomic terminology of a descriptive and prescriptive
nature, as well as a select number of morphological terms found
in various Yiddish manuals of botany and agronomy
Authorship. Although PNY has only one compiler, it is in essence
largely a collective work. It could not have been accomplished without the
many compilers of Yiddish textbooks and readers on the natural sciences
and geography, the translators and authors of travelogues, the terminologists
and lexicographers, the dialectologists and collectors of regional lexicon,
prose writers and poets with an eye for natural phenomena. Their indi-